The Director’s office
Dr. Ginny Barrett
Museum Director · The Urbanicity Museums · Towson, MD
Every application that comes through this portal lands on my desk. Not a filter, not a queue — me, with your file open. That is the whole reason the portal exists: so a person’s work arrives intact instead of shredded by a form.
What I look for is not a resume shape. It is evidence. Tell me a thing you built, catalogued, taught, repaired, or argued for, and tell me what it cost you. Then tell me what you would want to touch first here. That last question is the interview.
We are hiring for the long view — considerably longer than most. Crew before cargo: every hand knows the heading, and the take gets shared.
Dr. Ginny Barrett is Museum Director of Urbanicity, with charge over all the museums of the estate. She holds a Ph.D. in Public History and arrives with a mandate to grow the galleries, deepen the collection record, and open the doors wider.
Ginny Barrett arrived with a fresh plan for the five museums, and the place has moved faster since. She takes what she calls the long view - considerably longer than most. During her doctoral training she worked as a guest curator at the [Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum](https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/explore/museums/abby-aldrich-rockefeller-folk-art-museum/) in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, where she learned that ordinary objects, honestly labeled, outdraw any spectacle.
Like Hildebrand, she trained in the scholarship of Fernand Braudel and the Annales School, and the longue durée is her working tempo: the historical method that watches the slow, constant structural forces — geography, climate, and economy across centuries — rather than the fast surface of political events. When she says the long view, it is no figure of speech.
Under her direction the drawers opened to teachers, the docent corps was recruited from every century, and acquisition turned bold - she has a practiced eye and no sentimentality about where a thing has been. Ask about her career before museums and she will smile, pour you something, and change the subject. Vita: read for the first degree at Brindlewood University and the higher one at Halbrook College; taught 9 years at Copperfield Preparatory, served Calder Street Grammar School, then 19 years with Copperline Rail & Freight. (All institutions herein are inventions of the house.)
Five museums, two schools, one estate. The Director holds the collection record, the acquisition heading, the docent corps, and the teaching mandate — the drawers stay open to teachers, and the galleries answer to evidence.
Beat: Artifacts · Stories · Evidence · Reference
A question about a posting, a gap in your record, a schedule that does not fit the shape of the job? Ask before you assume it disqualifies you. It usually does not.
Register against a position and the portal opens a direct line to this office — that is the fastest way to reach me on the record.